Technical Structures

A Technical Structure is the physical breakdown of what a project is building. It lives at the top level of your project and holds a tree of Nodes — one Node for each part, system, or component of the final asset.

Each project has at most one Technical Structure (the relationship is 1:1). If a project has no physical deliverable, it may have none at all.

The tree model

Nodes nest inside other Nodes to any depth. The root Node typically represents the whole asset. From there you break it down into systems, sub-systems, and components — as deep as your procurement and engineering process needs.

A small example for a rooftop PV installation:

PV System (root)
├── Roof Array A
│   ├── String 1
│   └── String 2
└── Inverter Cabinet
    ├── Inverter Module 1
    └── Inverter Module 2

There is no fixed depth limit. A simple project might have three levels; a large factory might have ten or more.

What the Technical Structure holds

The Technical Structure itself stores:

Field	What it is
Title	A short human-readable name for the structure (e.g. “PV Plant – Site Alpha”)
Project	The project this structure belongs to

The detail lives in the Nodes beneath it. See Nodes and Requirements for what you can record on each Node.

Starting from scratch

GreenVee does not provide plant templates. Each project starts with a blank Technical Structure and you build the tree to match your actual asset. In practice, teams often copy the pattern of a previous project by memory or by referring to a standard design — but that copying happens outside GreenVee.

For Engineers

The Technical Structure is your home base for describing the physical deliverable. Build it out during the Definition or Planning phase so that procurement has a target before purchasing begins. You can add Nodes at any time as the design matures.

How it connects to the rest of the project

The Technical Structure sits alongside the work plan (Segments and Tasks) — it does not replace it. The work plan answers “how do we do the work?”; the Technical Structure answers “what are we building?”.

Purchases and material movements eventually trace back to specific Nodes in this tree, giving you a record of what was installed where. That story is covered in Engineering to Procurement.

Working with the tree in the app

Inside a project, the Technical Structure shows up as a tree on one side with a detail panel on the other:

• Click any Node, Required Good, or Required Material in the tree to open it in the detail panel.
• With a Node selected, three buttons above the tree let you add a child Node, a Required Good, or a Required Material underneath it.
• Deleting an item always asks for confirmation first, and cannot be undone.

For Engineers

Deleting a Required Good that was fulfilling a Required Material automatically reopens that Required Material so it shows up as unassigned again — see Engineering to Procurement for how that guard works.

Browsing every Technical Structure

GreenVee also has a Technical Structures overview that lists every Technical Structure across all projects at once, together with the Nodes underneath each one. It is a quick way to jump straight to a structure or Node without opening its owning project first.

When a record opens in the generic viewer

Nodes, Required Goods, and Required Materials each have their own polished detail panel — but that panel only appears when you reach them through their project’s tree. If you follow a link to one of these records from somewhere else in the app (or reach a supporting record such as a single Required Spec, which has no dedicated panel of its own), it opens in GreenVee’s generic record view instead: the same underlying data, shown as a plain list of fields, the records it links to, and the records that link back to it.